Joseph “Joe” Friedman, a history buff and one of the founding members of the former Temple Judea in Daly City, died March 20. He was 83.
Friedman was born in San Francisco on Dec. 4, 1922 to Russian immigrants who had come to San Francisco less than a decade earlier. His father was a peddler, selling goods to agricultural workers up the California coast.
Friedman’s mother died just before he turned 7, and his father died when he was 19. He graduated from Lowell High School in 1939 and obtained a bachelor’s degree in business from U.C. Berkeley in 1943.
From March 1943 to December 1945, he served in the U.S. Army in Italy. When he returned, he got a job with the Internal Revenue Service, where he would stay the rest of his career.
He married Dorothy “Dot” Rosenthal on Dec. 21, 1947. She died in 2004.
The Friedmans were among the founding members of Reform Temple Judea. Joe Friedman served as treasurer during its early years, and briefly served as its last president before the merger with Temple Beth Israel in 1969. While Friedman worked with close friend Rabbi Herbert Morris on the merger, he did not want to remain president once the merger was complete.
“He was instrumental in raising money for the new temple building so it could be built,” said Rabbi Evan Goodman, the current spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel-Judea. “But he did not want to be president because he was such a close friend of Rabbi Morris and his wife, Judy, that he didn’t want to face any conflicts that might arise because of that.”
Henry Greenberg, cantor emeritus of Beth Israel-Judea, said it was because of the Friedmans that he got his job there.
“I had been cantor of a little synagogue in Daly City,” Greenberg said. “The Friedmans suggested to Morris that I’m the man for them, and that was 35 years ago.”
Goodman said that while Friedman was not a particularly religious man, the Jewish community was extremely important to him. He also belonged to Lebanon Pacific Masonic Lodge #136 F&AM, Pacific Starr King Masonic Lodge #344 F&AM and Scottish Rite.
Always a history buff, Friedman entered U.C. Berkeley after retiring from the IRS at age 55, to obtain a second bachelor’s degree in history. He graduated in 1980. During that time, he also volunteered to help get Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo/San Francisco) elected to Congress for his first term, serving as assistant treasurer of the campaign.
His daughter Muriel Friedman of Missoula, Mont., remembered how as a teenager she once was spouting some of the anti-communist rhetoric common at the time, but her father told her that were things different, she could just as easily have been born in the Soviet Union. “He had a sense of people’s common humanity,” she said.
Together with his daughter Carol Bennett, now of Austin, Texas, Friedman wrote a historical novel about the Mormons called “Odysseys of the Saints.”
“He wrote the draft of sections one, three and five, and I wrote two, four and six, and we edited each other’s work and turned it into a unified whole,” she said. “It was a great experience, though he wrote all the sex scenes, and it’s a little odd editing a sex scene written by your father.”
In addition to his daughters, Friedman is survived by his son, Howard, of Agoura Hills, and two grandsons.
Donations can be made to Jewish Family and Children’s Services, 2150 Post St., S.F., CA 94115.